Abstract:
Liu Xie introduced “Fu, Bi and Xing” according to the “six styles of poetry” in The Master of the Rites of the Zhou Dynasty and the view of “The Book of Songs contains six types of meaning” in The Foreword to Mao Heng and Mao Chang’s Collections of Ancient Poems. Several scholars, such as Zheng Xuan, Liu Xu, and Zhi Yu, offered their own explanations about “Fu, Bi and Xing” but their explanations were varied and different. Based on the former interpretations, Liu Xie absorbed the advantages and deleted the disadvantages, interpreting “Fu” as a direct way of “describing things and expressing the mind”, “Bi” as “comparison” and “Xing” as the “way to emote the audience”. Moreover, he provided the classification of the tenor and vehicle in “Bi” and offered a deep analysis of similarity and difference between “Bi” and “Xing”. Liu Xie’s theory of “Fu, Bi and Xing” laid out the primary direction of interpreting these notions and has remained as the most authoritative and most reasonable up till now.
